Pre- and Post-emerge Planning

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, and prepay opportunities available at that time, farmers are trying to find ways to cut expenses for the 2025 growing season. I often hear the question, “Do I really need to spend money to apply a pre-emerge chemical in front of my crops, or should I add a residual to my post application?” The answer is yes on both questions! 
 
There are many areas in our trade territory that have weeds that are tolerant or resistant to many of our post applied chemicals. Many weed populations, such as water hemp, have only one post-emerge option, and that option is not the same in all geographies. Tillage may terminate many emerged weeds before planting, but with no-till being the tillage system of choice in many areas, we must rely entirely on chemistry to take care of our weed pressures. 
 
With no entirely new chemistry coming to the market soon, it makes it important to use as many modes of action as practical to keep weeds under control. Many of the top-performing, pre-emerge chemicals offer multiple modes of action. Following them with a post-emerge chemical will take care of any escapes from the pre-emerge program. Adding another layer of residual at post-application will give us a chemical program offering many effective modes of action to control the resistant/tolerant weed populations. 
 
Yes, you may get by without using a pre chemical for a year or two, but it will eventually catch up, almost every weed trainwreck that I have seen as of late can be attributed to only one effective mode of action and lack of a good preemergence chemical program. We will end up making larger populations of weeds that are resistant/tolerant to the chemistry available on the market today, and a train wreck of weeds will result with the lack of good residuals. 
 
Talk to your local SFG agronomist to help with a good two-pass chemical program that will add returns to your bottom line of both corn and soybeans in 2025.